[ Lost in the Landscape ]

seed saving banned?

View the update to this post here.

Here’s a bit of polit­i­cal unpleas­ant­ness I read about in a seed descrip­tion in the Baker Creek Heir­loom Seeds cat­a­log list­ing for the Iraqi tomato vari­ety, Rouge D’Irak:

Sav­ing seeds was made ille­gal under the “Colo­nial Pow­ers” of the United States. Under the new law, Iraqi farm­ers must only plant seeds from “pro­tected vari­eties” from inter­na­tional corporations.

First Hilibur­ton, then Black­wa­ter, and now mon­ster agribusi­ness tak­ing advan­tage of the war. I wish I was surprised.

The Baker Creek online cat­a­log actu­ally lists five dif­fer­ent plants of Iraqi ori­gin, in case you’d like to help pre­serve vari­eties that Iraqi farm­ers now can’t legally grow from their own seeds: four toma­toes, Tatar of Mon­golis­tan, Rouge D’Irak, Al-Kuffa, and Nin­eveh; along with a melon, Bagh­dad Long. Aren’t you heir­loom tomato spe­cial­ists look­ing for new vari­eties to try? How about these plants with an amaz­ing con­tem­po­rary history?

Doing some quick research on this I ran across a post­ing over at The Alchemist’s Gar­den that’s great read­ing. Take a look!

January 10 2009 | Categories: gardening | Tags: Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds • heirloom tomatoes • heirloom vegetables • Iraq • Iraq War • melons • politics • saving seeds • tomato seeds • tomatoes | 4 Comments »

farewell to tomatoes

Last week­end I pulled up the first of this year’s tomato plants, an Early Girl that had stopped pro­duc­ing. I’m star­ing at Mis­ter Stripey, which has just a few fruits left, and, most sad of all, my main Chero­kee Pur­ple plant, which has flow­ers but not remain­ing fruit. There’s no way the fruit would set and ripen before the weather turns even colder. It’ll be hard, but those plants will have to go soon.

To think, two weeks ago the kitchen cut­ting board looked like this.

But now the only toma­toes on the counter are some a friend gave us at his birth­day party last Fri­day. As I left his house with the bag, I felt like a how a hard­work­ing laborer must feel after he’s laid off after thirty years and has to go on food stamps or some other gov­ern­men­tal assis­tance. It was hard, swal­low­ing my pride, accept­ing hand­outs. But the end of sum­mer has lots of hum­bling moments when the glo­ri­ously gaudy excess of sum­mer sud­denly shuts off.

It was a good time to eval­u­ate the three vari­eties I put in the ground this year. Early Girl was green and unpro­duc­tive most of the year, only pro­duc­ing fruit late in the sea­son and in unim­pres­sive quan­tity. Their fla­vor was fine, cer­tainly bet­ter than store toma­toes, but not as good as a tomato could be. I will not be grow­ing it again.

I trashed Mis­ter Stripey on these blog pages ear­lier in the sea­son for its ram­bunc­tious­ness. When it finally set­tled down and started to pro­duce it ended up being the most pro­lific of the three vari­eties, giv­ing us several-to-many smaller-sized toma­toes sev­eral times a week. The skin was thin and they didn’t keep as well as other vari­eties. Also the insides were very liq­uid, not at all meaty like beef­steak vari­eties; but sliced up on a tomato pizza they were stun­ning with their gold and rose and scar­let col­ors. I don’t know that I’ll grow it again next year, but I’ll save some seed from the one of the last fruits.

And as far as Chero­kee Pur­ple, yes, I’ll def­i­nitely grow it again. (I’ve already saved a small enve­lope of seeds to plant and share.) I’d put four plants in the ground this year. Three were in bad spots for toma­toes and barely pro­duced. The one plant that rated a prime spot did well, pro­duc­ing a vig­or­ous but not crazed green canopy, and the fruits were usu­ally in the ten-to-fourteen ounce range. The fla­vor of these was clas­sic tomato fla­vor, even here near the coast where the tem­per­a­tures barely cracked eighty degrees this summer.

The trick for next sea­son, of course, is to set aside some good spots for Chero­kee Pur­ple and the cou­ple other vari­eties I might try. Empty space in a gar­den? What’s that?

As long as I’m on the sub­ject of toma­toes, I wanted to share Rein­hards Tomaten, an excel­lent Ger­man site with pho­tos of dozens of vari­eties of toma­toes that Hans shared with me this past week. Although there were no pho­tos of the one vari­ety of mine that I was think­ing might have come mis-identified this year (Mis­ter Stripey), there’s a photo of Chero­kee Pur­ple, plus shots of intrigu­ing vari­eties like Black Russ­ian, Tla­colula Ribbed and the wild tomato rel­a­tive Lycop­er­si­con macro­carpum lutea. If only I had more space to grow more of them…

September 09 2008 | Categories: gardening • my garden • plant profiles | Tags: Cherokee Purple tomato • Early Girl tomato • heirloom tomatoes • Mister Stripey tomato • Mr. Stripey tomato • tomatoes | 1 Comment »

attack of the killer tomatoes

I men­tioned com­ing back from vaca­tion and almost imme­di­ately going after one of the tomato plants that had taken over its spot in the new orna­men­tal bed.

Just one week later and it seems like I’m con­tin­u­ing to relive scenes from that 1970s schlock­buster, Attack of the Killer Toma­toes. (It was a movie so awful you had to love it, and it had the added bonus of being filmed right here, in San Diego, much of it in Mis­sion Val­ley, not more than 3–4 miles from my house. Imag­ine a hor­ror flick where the evil ele­ments are lit­tle toma­toes that jump up and go after the jugu­lar of the per­son prepar­ing to put them in his salad. Lots of tomato juice was spilled in that flick but all in the name of a ridicu­lous plot line. Unfor­tu­nately, all that seems a lit­tle sickly pre­scient these days when peo­ple are being advised against eat­ing toma­toes for fear of sal­mo­nella poisoning…)

My tomato prob­lem began with two plants from the gar­den cen­ter, the heir­loom Mr. Stripey, show in the back of the photo, and the ubiq­ui­tous mod­ern hybrid Early Girl, which is shown in the front, a week after I’d already chopped a third of the plant. Both are inde­ter­mi­nate vines, which means they keep grow­ing and grow­ing through­out their short life spans. The good con­se­quence of that is that they con­tinue to bear fruit for months. The bad is that they can grow out of control–I mea­sured Mr. Stripey and he’s already eight feet across and four high, and this at the start of only June! There are tomato cages in that pic­ture, but can you seem them?

One les­son learned out of all this is that toma­toes can respond to too much water by grow­ing like crazy, while not nec­es­sar­ily pro­duc­ing any more fruit. These two mon­sters were planted in the “guilty plea­sure” flower bed, where some higher water-use trop­i­cal neces­si­tate water­ing more fre­quently than I would in a veg­etable gar­den. You can restrict size of the plants some­what by reduc­ing the watering–or by prun­ing shears.

A cou­ple months ago I’d writ­ten about sav­ing seeds from Chero­kee Pur­ple, that ugli­est and most tasty of tomato vari­eties. Those trans­plants so far are a lot bet­ter behaved. The one below is only about four­teen inches tall and two feet across, and it’s been bloom­ing for three weeks–But then again small and well behaved is how the killer pair in the orna­men­tal bed started. At least Chero­kee Pur­ple has a rep­u­ta­tion for bal­anc­ing plant size with pro­duc­tiv­ity and high fruit quality.

If the plants don’t over­run the gar­den this should be a ban­ner tomato year, and I’m already get­ting ready to whip up salsa, cap­rese sal­ads and plates of fresh toma­toes dressed lightly with basil and olive oil and a lit­tle salt. In the mean­time I’ll be stand­ing guard with the shears.

June 13 2008 | Categories: my garden | Tags: Cherokee Purple tomato • Early Girl tomato • heirloom tomatoes • Mr. Stripey tomato • tomatoes | No Comments »

winner of an ugly contest

Last sum­mer John and I were at the farmer’s mar­ket in Ocean Beach, a funky, alter­na­tive neigh­bor­hood of San Diego. We were look­ing over some of the offer­ings at a stall when some­one behind me starts laugh­ing and shouts out over my shoul­der, “Look at those ugly-ass tomatoes!”

Obvi­ously some­one used to the per­fectly shaped (and per­fectly taste­less) gro­cery store toma­toes, he was point­ing out a pile of Chero­kee Pur­ple toma­toes to his girl­friend. “They’re, like mutant. Who’d buy that?” To be sure, the toma­toes were flat, irreg­u­larly shaped and sized, partly green and partly reddish-purple. Noth­ing to win a spot on a pinup cal­en­dar of tomato vari­eties. But these toma­toes have their rabid fol­low­ers, and I count myself one of them. They’re like the best tomato you’ve tasted, and sliced up they’re actu­ally pretty attractive.

The above is a pic­ture from the Seed Savers Exchange cat­a­log [ source ]. These are pret­tier exam­ples than you usu­ally find of this variety.

One per­son even has a domain name, cherokeepurple.com attached to his blog entries about try­ing to grow this vari­ety (with­out much suc­cess) in Arkansas. I might not be that rabid, but last year I decided to save some seeds from the best exam­ples of Chero­kee Pur­ple from the farmer’s mar­kets so that I could grow my own. This is an heir­loom, open pol­li­nated vari­ety, so they should come true from seed.

I con­sulted Sav­ing Seeds, an older book by Marc Rogers that’s still avail­able via Ama­zon (and prob­a­bly a few other sell­ers). If you own the book, give it up–You’re a plant geek. There, the basic instruc­tions were to first clean the seeds as best as you could. Next you drop them into a jar full of water for a few days until the gummy pulp sur­round­ing the seeds fer­ments and lib­er­ates the seeds. When that hap­pens, the pre­vi­ously pulpy seeds–which floated–would sink to the bot­tom of the jar. Finally you drain and dry them and store them away. I fol­lowed the instruc­tions, but I was wor­ried that there was still some pulp attached to some of the seeds when I was done with the process so that not all of them sank.

The acid test came three weeks ago when I put some of the seeds into pots. Maybe not all the seeds were processed per­fectly, but I’m now the proud par­ent of six pots of Chero­kee Pur­ple seedlings!

I have a few spots around the yard selected for them, places where I’ve never put toma­toes, so I’m hop­ing they’ll take to their new loca­tions and thrive. I’ll prob­a­bly give them a cou­ple more weeks in their pots, and then it’s time to set them loose. I’ll post the baby pic­tures as they grow up…pictures so ugly only a par­ent and lover of Chero­kee Pur­ple could love.

April 07 2008 | Categories: gardening • my garden • plant profiles | Tags: Cherokee Purple tomato • heirloom tomatoes • saving seeds • seedlings • tomato seeds | 2 Comments »